In an age before computers, time tracking was a tactic for making sure employees clocked in and clocked out at their scheduled times. Visit a heritage museum and you might get a glimpse of one of those old punch clocks that managers coveted for keeping employees in line and on time—all back in an era when the average workday was from 9-5, in-house and in a cubicle.
Fast forward to the mid-pandemic digital age, and many standards have changed. Employees now work on flexible schedules in locations from around the world, putting less focus on when you clock in and out and more on what you get done. But this doesn’t mean that time tracking has gone the way of the dinosaur. In fact, it is still an extremely valuable asset for companies everywhere, but for different reasons. These days, we track time to ensure we are allocating our people and resources effectively. As brands scale at a record pace, they need everyone to work efficiently, spending less time on tasks that can be automated and more time on high-value projects and tasks. You can’t know if time is being wasted, however, if you don’t track what it’s spent on in the first place.
monday.com’s time tracking feature
Enter monday.com’s time tracking feature. It has been built for the modern company that needs to see how hours are being allocated across the board from teams all around the world.
On a basic level, it can track employee, freelancer, contractor, and client hours for invoicing and payroll, but it’s also built for a deeper purpose too. On a holistic level, monday.com’s time tracking feature is meant to improve company processes and structure by quantifying exactly what areas eat up the most resources and time. When this is tracked properly, departments can assess the ROI for hours worked, and measure whether certain tasks or projects should be re-assessed and re-organized to have more or less time spent on them. In a nutshell, it can clearly determine the people, projects, and clients that bring the company the most profit and gains. This can be done through:
- Individual task tracking: Tracking of employee hours worked on a particular task—this is extremely useful for long haul projects and last-minute projects, with the latter often requiring much of employees’ time and requiring managers to re-allocate resources to compensate for the time spent on new tasks.
- Team tracking: Tracking of total hours for teams to complete tasks and projects. This can be effective for determining work-back schedules for projects that involve multiple teams and departments who don’t all understand how long it may take to complete specific tasks.
- Whole project tracking: Tracking the total number of hours of a project from start to finish. This is useful for determining workload capacity and resources for current and future projects and can help separate high-value projects from low-value ones.
Technology features that make time tracking easy
monday.com has made time tracking seamless by making many features automated, so a one-time setup establishes an ongoing—yet adjustable—tracking system for every person, team, and the entire company. Once this is set up, everyone can see their hours in real-time and gather insights on the fly or in reports that quantify the metrics that teams and individuals get to determine. So, in addition to hours spent on a task, you can create reports to track in-house hours vs remote hours or design hours vs copy hours—the options are catered to your business needs.
Reports can also be exported to excel for easy accounting or reporting data analysis, which is a relief for multiple departments using the software.
Real-time data that people can act on
In a perfect world, project timeframes would always be accurate. Alas, reality shows us that this never happens. Accidents happen, delays occur, strategies shift—these very common occurrences require nimble tracking that shows if a project is taking up more or less time and resources than expected—all as it happens. Knowing this can help companies avoid projects from going over budget, and, ideally, help them keep future projects under budget.
Connected here, there, and everywhere
People now work on planes, trains, busses, ferries, and as they walk. Smartphones, tablets, and laptops have given us the ability to have 2-hour meetings while commuting to the office or to have company conferences while waiting to board planes. All these hours on the go can be inputted and tracked on any device, simplifying the process and ensuring hours remain accurate.
Want to learn more about monday.com’s time tracking feature and how to incorporate it for your team? Contact us for a free consultation.